


And When We Get To The Future You Will Fall Apart

by sixthletter



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance
Genre: AU, Angst, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Psychic Abilities, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-09
Updated: 2016-11-09
Packaged: 2018-08-30 01:45:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8513914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixthletter/pseuds/sixthletter
Summary: The first time it seemed obvious, looking back, Frank was driving along some highway in Idaho at some ungodly hour of the night, and Gerard (because this was back when they were trying to make the whole Gerard thing work; earlier, even - this was before they knew there was a thing to work around) was dozing in the passenger seat, fumbling towards consciousness whenever the radio static hit a particularly painful level but never quite making it. They were coming up to a junction when Gerard sat up, wide-eyed and said, "Go left.""Go back to sleep, dude," Frank told him. "We’re nowhere near our turning yet.""Left," he said again, and there was something hard in his voice, something deep and smooth and cold that made Frank turn because since when did Gerard sound anything like that? And then.And then, well.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I'm trying to move old fic to AO3 and I think this might actually be from a decade ago, which makes me feel haggard in the extreme. Forgive my mid-noughties stylings.

Gerard’s hands stroke down over Frank’s hip, work their way under the hem of his shirt.

"I remember this," he says, and Frank feels him smile.

-

The first time it seemed obvious, looking back, Frank was driving along some highway in Idaho at some ungodly hour of the night, and Gerard (because this was back when they were trying to make the whole Gerard thing work; earlier, even - this was before they knew there was a thing to work around) was dozing in the passenger seat, fumbling towards consciousness whenever the radio static hit a particularly painful level but never quite making it. They were coming up to a junction when Gerard sat up, wide-eyed and said, "Go left."

"Go back to sleep, dude," Frank told him. "We’re nowhere near our turning yet."

"Left," he said again, and there was something hard in his voice, something deep and smooth and cold that made Frank turn because since when did Gerard sound anything like that? And then.

And then, well.

The only way Frank could think of it after was that there was something under Gerard’s skin, something stretched tight across his skull that burned, something that was lighting him up from the inside out with this…this…

Actually, Frank tries not to think about it all that much.

But whatever it was, it made his breath catch and the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, and when Gerard reached over to take the wheel and steer the car off the highway, Frank let him.

Gerard fell asleep after that, and spent most of the next morning talking about this fucking awful dream he’d had where the van had hit black ice at sixty and skidded into this car full of drunken kids and they’d all died trapped in the wreckage. 

Weird, Frank thought. "Well then maybe you should fucking drive," he said, and sprawled across the back seat. Weird.

 

-

Later, when he’s used to calling Gerard up and listening to him slurp hospital coffee and babble about the paranoid schizophrenic two doors down, Frank wonders how they didn’t notice earlier.

"I was hammered," Gerard points out, "and I talked a lot." He takes another sip of coffee. "Besides, it’s not the kind of conclusion you jump to when overmedicated dudes start acting weird."

-

After Gerard got arrested, he made the smart move of telling all the policemen, reporters, doctors and legal representatives he was paraded in front of nothing but the absolute truth. 

They think it’s funny until a decade later, when he’s still in a hospital, every waking moment accounted for, and yet the bodies are showing up exactly where he predicted.

-

****

 

The first time they meet, it’s in the parking lot of some dive bar in Newark, and Frank’s hauling gear into the back of a van at the end of Graveyard’s final gig. It’s raining – the soft yet persistent kind that plasters your shirt to your back without you noticing – and Frank’s in a shitty mood, because this is the second band he’s fucked up in six months, and odds are he’s never going to be able to afford to employ someone to do this kind of shit for him. Not that that’s important, but he’s sore and wet and really, really wishes he had someone to punch, and if there’s a roadie out there who can’t take one to the jaw with dignity, Frank hasn’t met him yet.

"Hi," says a voice behind him. It’s high and rises higher towards the end, kind of breathy and kind of slurred and Frank wonders, as he turns, whether or not this guy’s drunk enough not to feel anything if he just lays one on him. Probably not.

Frank forces his hands into open palms. He inhales. He grinds out a "Hey," which only sounds a little psychotic. 

The guy’s almost familiar, like a messier version of someone Frank might have met once, pale in the lights from the bar, hair matted and wet. He peers at Frank for a moment, eyes narrowed then wide then crinkling at the edges as he smiles wider than any human being Frank’s ever met. "I’m Gerard," he says eventually, still grinning. "You should check out my band."

-

The first time Frank plays with them live, they’re touring with Underoath and the venues aren’t huge but they tend to be pretty packed out, and the kids aren’t there to see them but they’re responsive enough. It’s somewhere between awesome and terrifying, with a dash of fucking weird thrown in for good measure. 

"Yeah," Ray says slowly, when Frank tells him this, "I didn’t think we’d get this off the ground for a while, and now we have an actual tour. It’s all…" he shrugs.

"Yeah," Frank says, thinking of the times when Gerard climbs into the crowd, clinging to the barrier, then reels back looking like he’s seen something that’s scared him shitless, like he’s in physical pain. "Like that."

-

 

Gerard’s just not into hospitals. 

The thing with his shoelaces, it’s not – it wasn’t, he was just. It was a bad day. Like most days, recently. Like most days here.

He’ll be fine once he’s moved. 

Probably.

-

Frank thinks he’s going to turn inside out. His throat burns. His nose burns. He thinks he might be vomiting out of his tear ducts. He’s going to die. He’s going to cough up his fucking stomach in The Used’s bathroom and fucking _die_. He’s fairly sure that, as the lead singer, he’s entitled to a slightly more dramatic death than this.

God seems to think so, too, and in a rare show of pity He makes everything stop. Frank slumps on the floor, boneless, and takes deep, grateful breaths. The linoleum is cool and steady under him, not spinning for the first time in far too long. Life is good. Life is _continuing_. Buoyed by this realisation, he hauls himself upright. The room rearranges itself as he moves, tilting at an unnatural angle before snapping back at a speed that makes him stumble, but he manages to get to the window and force it open a couple of inches. He sucks in fresh air, swears under his breath, a litany of thanks. 

"Hey," calls a voice from under the window, deep and rough in a way that suggests the speaker knows _exactly_ what Frank is going through. "You okay in there?"

Frank doesn’t think much of it, until Gerard calls later, voice long-distance faded and scratchy but happy, lighter than Frank’s heard it in a long time. When he asks, "So, you met him?" Frank can hear the smile. "Oh man, seriously, it’s going to be. Fucking _yes_. Tell him I say hi."

-

Gerard’s new hospital is some specialist deal, hidden away in the wilds of upstate New York. The brochure – they have a brochure, which is the first sign – uses the word "progressive" a lot, admits to being "at times, experimental" and wants to teach patients "that it is possible to live with what many people consider to be an incurable disease."

Which is totally not funny, right up until his roommate introduces himself with the words, "hi, I’m Jesse, I can move things with my mind," at which point it becomes _hysterical_.

"At least he doesn’t think I’m crazy," Gerard points out the first time Frank calls. "He thinks he’s acting out the Divine Plan and is alternately master of the known universe and a pawn of unknown Powers – he talks in upper case, dude, not many people can do that – but he doesn’t think I’m crazy. Which is nice and all, but then do I have to believe him back? Because if I’m not mad then he doesn’t have to be, you know?"

"This is the telekinetic guy?"

"Uh-huh."

"Does he ever telekinet things?"

Frank can hear Gerard thinking, pushing a hand through what’s left of his hair.

"Not that I’ve seen."

"Well then he’s probably a mental patient rather than a…what _are_ you?"

A chuckle, short and low, something remembered. "He called me a prophet."

Frank laughs, pressing the receiver between his ear and shoulder and leaning back against the side of the booth. "Awesome," he says. "We should send you to one of those televangelist shows. Get you to like, predict he rapture or some shit, hurry the prayer pyramid along. You and Jerry Falwell could be like, brothers in arms against the coming Apocalypse. Leaders of the End Times."

Gerard makes a dismissive noise, half snort and half sigh. "Please. Falwell’s dates are fucked."

-

"They’re not bad," Ray says. "Kind of sloppy."

"Hmmm." 

They’ve been checking out the other acts, prowling the backs of crowds and the sides of stages, trying to weigh up the competition in a way that’s not exactly guileless but not exactly all business either, and have somehow wound up watching the second half of Fall Out Boy’s set.

"Hmmm?"

"Hmmm. The bassist is kind of... What do you think he’s on?" The bassist in question is wearing so many layers of clothing he may as well be mummified, sweating until he shakes in the summer heat and pacing up and down the back of the stage like it’s a cage he doesn’t want to be in. He’s got that glassy-eyed look, the one that says, ‘I don’t know where I am and don’t remember getting here,’ and Frank’s pretty sure he’s dropped something slow burning. 

Ray shrugs. "Mikey’s talked to him a couple of times. Says he’s okay, for a psychopath."

"He’s a psycho?"

Ray shrugs again. "That’s the rumour. Apparently he’s strange."

"Our kind of strange?"

-

Frank’s well aware that becoming nocturnal is a fairly normal response to heavy touring, but Pete? Pete’s sleep schedule is so fucked it’s impressive. Frank’s seen Patrick – or Joe? one of the two – try and wake him for a show once, and they practically had to taser the guy. 

-

"That was-"  


"Yeah. Not that-"

"No! Not that that. It. That."

"Yeah."

"Yeah."  


"I should probably – "

"Do you want to –"

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

  
"Um. So."

"But you’ll call me if-?"

"Oh, yeah, yeah, I’ll definitely. Call, I mean, you’ve been really. Thanks. And thanks."

"No, it’s fine, it’s good, it’s been – "

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

"I think those are Pete’s pants," Patrick points out.

"Oh yeah," Mikey says, tossing them back onto the floor. "Did you see where my shirt went?"

-

"Patrick?" Bob asks one time, when he and Mikey are hovering outside the bus, smoking. He sounds like he’s struggling not to laugh. "I mean, he’s a stand-up guy, but. _Patrick_?"

Mikey shrugs. "We get on, you know? And he gets it, the Gerard deal. He’s got. Things. Of his own."  


"I get that touring with Wentz must push your tolerance for fucked up shit pretty high, but fucking _Patrick_. Does he give amazing head or something?"

Mikey looks thoughtful. "That helps," he admits. "That definitely helps."

-

Frank visits the most. Originally, he’d head up to the hospital to talk shop, kick around ideas for lyrics, try and work out new ways to deliver old songs but keep them recognisable. It was difficult, because Frank didn’t really want to look at or speak to the version of his best friend who stabbed a teenager in a Best Buy in Nebraska and so had to be kept under supervision and in restraints, and talking about how well the band was doing just seemed fucking cruel.

"Frank," Gerard had said, far more evenly than anyone who needed a straightjacket should have managed. "I already know. I already _knew_."

And it was easy, after that.

Ray visits briefly but frequently (even more so now he’s in the new place), makes small talk and brings mix tapes and is nice, in a slightly awkward way.

Gerard and Bob have been formally introduced. Bob hasn’t been back. Gerard doesn’t blame him.

Mikey’s visits are sporadic but lengthy, easy in a resigned sort of way. And if he’s not comfortable with Gerard telling stories about other patients in exchange for news of the tour, he hides it well. Gerard likes to throw him off by answering questions before they’re asked, or asking after people Mikey hasn’t mentioned meeting. Throwing out casual questions like, "How’s Patrick?" 

The first time he asks this, Mikey breaks away from his detailed examination of the table top and asks who Patrick is. "Ah," Gerard says, summoning up his best mystical gypsy voice, "that must be next year."

-

"He asked after me last year?"

"He gets his dates mixed up sometimes." Mikey pokes experimentally at the hamburger a woman in catering thrust at him. It’s a strange shade of pink, edging into grey. "When you’ve seen to the end of time, one Warped is pretty much the same as the next. Do you think this’ll kill me?"

"See, this is why you have to pretend you don’t eat meat," Patrick explains, picking up the burger and tossing it to a safe distance. "It’s hard to kill a herbivore. Besides, don’t you know this kind of thing already?"

"Gee doesn’t like talking about future stuff. I mean he does, sometimes, but not anything like that. Not anything final."

Patrick prods a wilted vegetable thoughtfully, considers tossing it after the burger. "Do you think he would?"

-

It’s a cold night, but Pete can’t really feel it. He’s running on adrenaline and something that feels quite a lot like blind terror, and while that sharpens the rest of the world up nicely, he doesn’t quite feel connected to his own body. He can see his breath clouding in front of him, but he’s not even shaking. He hears Gerard before he sees him – the scrape of a door against the shipped concrete, and then a figure shuffling out of the gloom, smiling and waving good-naturedly. Pete squints. "Are they…?" he begins, then stops. "Are you wearing cartoon pyjamas?" 

"It’s cold."

"You’re in a lavender robe."

"It’s Jesse’s. How are you not freezing?"

"Jesse?" Pete hasn’t seen anyone else around but –

"My roomie. He’s standing guard for us. They tend to keep a fairly close eye on the roof access, for-"

"Obvious reasons, yeah. Why the hell are we up here?" He’d intended to be nicer than this. Polite, almost, but he’s too on edge to edit himself right now and way too fucking high up.

"It’s a camera black spot. Plus, they’d never let you in the front way this late, and I am not wandering the grounds. It’s fucking freezing."

"Point."

Pete rocks back on the balls of his feet and pushes his hands deeper into the pockets of his hoodie, picking at the lining as he tries to think of something to say and some way to say it. Gerard digs into the pocket of his robe and pulls out a battered pack of cigarettes. "Want one?"

"I don’t. Can’t. Whatever."

"Mmm." Gerard lights up, takes a drag with obvious relish. "I quit last week. It was the biggest mistake of my life. Mikey managed. I blame your boy for that."

Pete laughs, but he doesn’t unwind at all, still balancing on his heels, arms taut. "Patrick can be persuasive when he wants to."  
  
"He sent me a ten-page letter. It was…"

"Persuasive?"

"Detailed."

And that’s when Pete relaxes, a little. 

"We should hurry up," Gerard says, grinding out his cigarette and straightening up a little, trying to look like he’s ready for business.

"I’ve got a while."  


"We haven’t."

Pete tenses again. "I," he says, and stares out over the grounds, out at the quiet and limitless space. "I’m. How I am. And getting worse and I just – " his mouth works silently, not quite managing to form the right words. "I’m going to fuck this up," he settles on, and saying it aloud seems to soothe him a little. He stands easier, looks less like he’s trying not to be sick. "That’s kind of a given. I need to know when, and how badly, and who I’m going to hurt."

-

Frank has learned to differentiate between days when Gerard is blithely accepting of his fate and days when he’s pretending to be.

On days when he pretends, he asks about the band, constantly, grinning and laughing and pushing for detail.

When he’s not, he trusts Frank. "I’ve seen the future," he’ll say, waving the sheets of notes away. "I already know they don’t suck." He’ll duck his head and smile, and Frank won’t say much.

-

"You probably shouldn’t have called her a cunt," Ray says, as the woman from _Rolling Stone_ marches out.

"He’s not in jail," Mikey spits, "and he never fucking murdered anyone."

Bob looks doubtful, but says that they didn’t really want the cover, anyway. All the cover bands he’s worked with have been assholes.

-

"I killed a guy once," Gerard says, quietly, toeing the gravel. "Well, I tried. He was okay in the end, I just punctured a lung but anyway, the point is that I see these things, these really fucked up things that people will do or that will happen to them, they reel out in my head like movies. And this guy, he's gonna kill...He's gonna kill a lot of people who don't deserve it, people I've known, people who...it doesn't matter. The point is, I saw it and I tried to stop it and it went badly for me, but. I see the future, y'know? I knew this would happen, even then, but I couldn't not try. It wouldn't have been. You know."  
  
"I know."  
  
"I had to _try_."  
  
"I can't believe that's actually true," Pete laughs. "I mean, I know I'm not in a position to be disbelieving, but you're wearing Spongebob pyjamas. You're wearing a purple robe. You don't have the look of a killer."  
  
"I told you, the robe's Jesse's."  
  
"That would explain it."  


"My point is," Gerard presses on, "that you can’t _not_ just because you _will_."

Pete looks at him for almost a whole minute, silent, panicked. Eventually, when he’s fairly sure he can make his voice sound even, he says: "You’re, um. You’re not going to tell me anything good, are you?"

Gerard takes out another cigarette. "That depends," he mutters round it. "Would you rather die old or popular?"

-

The first time they went to Japan, they played exactly one show before Gerard started jabbering and screaming and freaking the fuck out because it wouldn’t _stop_ , and the doctors kept asking what he’d taken but none of them had seen him do anything and Mikey pitched a fit because he shouldn’t have been taken to a fucking hospital, and three days later they were back in Jersey and Frank was the lead singer and no-one could look Mikey in the eye.

"You wouldn’t have believed me," he told them, "if I’d told you about it before."

And Ray said, "Where the hell is Matt?"

-

Sometimes Jesus talks to Jesse about the end of the world. As far as Gerard can tell, the two have a very casual relationship. Jesus takes Jesse out, they knock back a couple of beers, shoot some pool, and then Jesse becomes an agent of the Divine Will for a few hours, during which time he is a prisoner in his own body, under the direct control of the Lord. Something like that. 

"It’s going to be like the Rapture in reverse," Jesse explains, mouth set, hands spread. "The sky’s gonna fall. It’ll look beautiful. It’ll _feel_ beautiful. But you’ve already seen that, right? You’re the Prophet."

-

Apparently, Jesus forgot to mention that Gerard once stabbed a teenager in a Best Buy. It slipped His mind.

"You can’t," Jesse says, through clenched teeth. "You’re supposed to be _holy_." His shoulders are hunched and his eyes are wet, red-rimmed, but he’s still ready somehow. Still ready to attack, and Gerard (who knows what the end of the world looks like but, more pertinently, knows what Jesse's world looks like, knows that he never leaves) keeps his distance, keeps his hands up and apart as he explains that he had to do that, or he'd never have come here. They'd never have met. The Will would not have been fulfilled. The boy was a sacrifice.  
  
"A lamb."  
  
"A lamb," Gerard echoes. He tries hard to sound like he means it.

\- 

One time, about six months before he moved into the woods and started stockpiling small arms, Jesse climbed onto the counter at an electronics store and started preaching.

A Best Buy, actually.

"I’m beginning to think," Gerard tells Frank, leaning close, conspiratorial, "that crazy people should shop at Radio Shack."

-

Patrick sends him this ten-page letter, this twenty-side notebook-sized flow chart of the inside of his bandmate’s head, and Gerard lies back on his bed, legs crossed at the ankle, cigarette slowly burning its way towards his lip, and reads it.

At side five, "You’re not allowed to smoke in here," Jesse says.

"What are they going to do, lock me up?"

At side twelve: "Is it important? Is it ours?"

"It’s about a friend of a friend of my brother."

"An important one?"

Gerard spits out the stub of his cigarette, folds the pages in on themselves and, staring at Jesse like he’s never seen him before, he says, "Maybe. For you."

-

There’s nothing like someone you knew in High School having a kid to make you feel like you’ve been out of the world too long.

Gerard would resent Ray for it, a little, if he didn’t know what was going to happen next.

-

Mikey borrows Frank’s phone sometime around midnight somewhere around Austin, explaining that Gerard’s had a shitty day and had to explain the Best Buy Incident _again_ , and that he wants Mikey to call.

"How the hell can you know that if you haven’t called already?"

Mikey shrugs. "It’s on the list," he says, like everyone already knew he had a sheet of dates written out in Gerard’s dead-spider handwriting tucked away in the back of a book somewhere.

This day is important. This day and that day and yesterday and tomorrow, colour-coded and sometimes with notes, and Mikey’s not entirely sure how the code works yet because there are some colours he won’t come to for a couple of years, but he knows that today has been a hard day in the psych ward and that it’s Jesse’s fault. "Jesse makes things kind of difficult," he explains, like Frank’s never visited and seen.

-

The thing with Jesse is, sometimes he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s compelled, is what he is. Can’t help himself. He is a tool of some greater good.

So when he shuffles over to Gerard – who is currently on side seventeen, and is just about to get to the best bit – and sits on the plastic-covered mattress and blinks in the light from the barred window and takes Gerard’s new cigarette from his mouth as he says, "I can’t -. It’s not my idea, I just need…" and leans close, presses their mouths together, takes the letter gently and sets it aside – none of that could be blamed on Jesse, really. 

He couldn’t help it, after all.

And Gerard, who has seen how the world ends but, more pertinently, has seen how Jesse’s world ends, kisses back.

-  


Patrick’s halfway back to the bus, halfway back to air conditioning, when some skinny guy in glasses puts a hand on his arm and says, all casual and friendly-like, "You’re probably going to freak out and punch me, but my brother said to tell you I know about Pete."

The way he says it, it’s obvious what he means. 

Patrick freaks out and punches him.

-

Back when he drank his way on stage – way back, when they were working round the whole thing, when they didn’t know there was a thing to work around – Gerard used to drink a toast to peace and quiet.

For peace and quiet, read: the lives of ten or twenty or five hundred kids not spooling out behind his eyes like ten or twenty or five hundred snuff movies simultaneously screened, simultaneously repeated.

The nice thing about the hospital is, the people in there have already done everything they will ever find exciting or frightening or hard. Since two weeks into his stay, Gerard’s head’s been quiet enough that he can sleep.

-

Jesse gets sent out when they have this talk, because in the eyes of his keepers Gerard has been slowly progressing toward sanity and stability and so Frank can now visit him in the space where he sleeps.

"He’s crazy," Frank points out.

"It’s not infectious."

"I didn’t think you were allowed."

"Which is why you’re not telling anyone." Gerard digs a nail into the Styrofoam of his cup, scratches another swooping, not-quite-vertical line. "Right?"

"Is it even legal?"

" _What_?"

"Is it like, isn’t there that law, where people can’t consent if they’re not, if the don’t have the capacity…"

"He's deluded, not retarded. Jesus, what, you think I’m molesting him now?"

"No, I just." Frank’s foot taps against the metal frame of the bed, clinking it a millimetre across the floor with every kick. "I just. I dunno."

-

Frank supposes he should be grateful that Jesus apparently no longer hates on the gay man, but somehow he can’t quite care.

-

"It’s okay," says Jesse. "In the eyes of God, we’re still one."

-

"Just go," Mikey advises. "You’ll forgive him by Tuesday anyway." He holds up the list as proof.

-

"I freaked out the most by far," Patrick said, way back. "Far and away the worst. I don’t think there’s, you know, a term in English for how much distance there was between me and the others, because Andy was pissed and Joe was scared but I was freaked out of my mind."

"A league?" Mikey suggested. "A furlong? A furlong of emotional trauma?"

"If you want. Because, I don’t know, I had been there before, when he’d been paranoid and kind of, not well, and if I’d taken him more seriously then maybe…"

"Uh-huh." They were on a bench behind a tent at the far end of what was usually a parking lot, and Mikey had spent the last two hours nodding and maintaining eye contact and giving reassuring pats to Patrick’s arm, except after a while he remembers that he stopped patting and was just sort of, like, stroking. Like the forearm version of groping, whatever.

"I’m usually smoother than this," Mikey said, "but I’ve been told how this works out."

He leant forward, lips parted, hands slipping lower.

Patrick freaked out and punched him.

-

The first time he calls Patrick, Gerard opens with: "I apologise for my brother’s complete lack of class. And for pulling your phone number out of my head. I usually don’t try shit like this, but it’s a Friday night; I can be immoral if I want to."

"Um," says Patrick, "are you sure you’ve got the right number? And if you have, what the hell have I ever done to you?"

-

The thing with Jesse is, he doesn’t ever get better, but sometimes he gets bad enough to entertain the thought that if he’s trapped here, if he can’t be out in the world, preaching to moderately priced electronics and stockpiling small arms in wooded areas, maybe he should just wait until someone figures out the new code to the roof door, and then step off the edge and ascend. 

-

Frank gets in his car and he drives, angry and blind, the heat fogging up windows that are still lined with February frost on the outside. He cranks the radio and smokes cloves and shouts at the DJ a lot because he is _not_ going to walk into a hospital and start screaming. 

Instead, he walks into a hospital, looks gravely at the nurse on duty and explains, solemnly, that he has important news for Mr. Way. Family news. Private. Urgent. Frank’s good at not letting people ask questions. He’s got this knack for making people make exceptions for him.

He gets led to Gerard’s room (which is exactly like all the others, unless you take the time to memorise the fact that it’s the third on the left of the fourth corridor on the second floor) and he gets left there and he says, "I’m not fucking forgiving you anything because fuck you, you haven’t done anything, you can fuck whoever you want, it’s fine."

Well, he doesn’t exactly _say_ it, but he doesn’t scream it, either.

-

"The thing is," Gerard tells Patrick, "it’s really, really important that you get to like him. He can make your life a lot easier if you just hold off on the domestic violence for a second."

-

Frank’s face is taut with the effort of not screaming. He feels like the bones of his jaw are warping under the pressure. 

He’s going to grind his teeth into dust.

And Gerard – Gerard, whose perfectly calm, smooth face is all of an inch away, wide-eyed and tight-lipped - says, "I’m not. We’re not, anymore."

-

About twenty seconds and three metres before Jesse ascends, Pete Wentz asks if he remembers him. Pete Wentz apologises for leaving it so long between messages, but it’s a busy life, being an Agent. Pete says, "There are some things I have to tell you."

-

And Frank’s face falls, goes slack with relief and Gerard looks up at him, all white skin and lashes and gratitude. "I remember this," he says. "Oh God, I’ve remembered this for so long." 

He closes the space between them.

-

"You can’t _not_ ," he says, "just because you _will_."

-

Gerard’s hands stroke down over Frank’s hip, work their way under the hem of his shirt.

And Frank says, "Tell me what you remember."


End file.
